Saturday, August 11, 2012

I made it. My back was very sore (bulging/borderline herniated disc, it's not clear just what is going on). But I made it.

Extremely long line in immigration/customs. The Santiago airport has two peak load times, early morn and late evening. The morning is bad. Four or five large flights all arrive within 20 mins of each other. And there are 8 functioning passport control stations. We're talking about 1,000 plus people all waiting for some very calm and placid public officials here. Took an hour to have immigration control person spend all of 20 seconds on my passport. Ugh.

Then stood outside a door that was only about 50 meters from the door where my taxi driver was standing, with a sign with my name on it. A bad equilibrium, for another 30 minutes.

Still, I made it, and now the EYM are going out for a coffee and pastry. Then, 2 pm we are heading for Cafe Tiramisu for some very nice pizza.

Chartist surrealism appears in online medical journals too! LeBron links to the following amazing chart of "excess health care spending growth". The article in the New England Journal of Medicine defines "excess" growth as the difference between the growth of health care spending and the growth of potential GDP (no word if this is "real" potential or "nominal" potential GDP).

Sweet!

Just to summarize, they are taking a totally unobservable and made up variable and using it to define another unobservable and totally made up concept, that of "excess" health care spending.

Shouldn't excess spending be defined as wasteful spending, like unnecessary tests or surgeries or inefficient record keeping?

Doesn't health care have to be paid for out of actual GDP? Can you tell your doctor, look, the output gap is 13%, so I am only paying 87% of this bill.

How can anyone define the correct path of health care spending? Must it be a constant portion of GDP? Why? Why couldn't preventative care and lifestyle adjustment make health care shrink as a proportion of GDP? Or conversely, why couldn't some amazing but expensive breakthrough cause optimal health care spending to soar as a percentage of GDP?

A steep price increase for most permits required to play tennis on New York City's public courts has changed the game, pricing out thousands of players while creating shorter wait times for those who can afford to pay.The Parks Department first served up higher fees for public tennis in 2011, doubling the prices paid by players between the ages of 18 and 61. Single-pay passes for an hour of court time jumped to $15 from $7, while season passes rose to $200 from $100.Far fewer tennis permits have been sold under the new prices, according to data from the Parks Department. Sales of season passes for most players slipped by 40%, with 7,400 sold in 2011 as compared to 12,400 in 2010. (Only about 6,800 passes had been sold by the end of June 2012 to players purchasing unlimited court time for the year.)Sales of single-play passes for this group of adults took a big hit as well, dropping by nearly a third from more than 40,000 for the 2010 season to about 27,000 last year. Preliminary numbers through June show about 9,700 passes sold, though the Parks Department cautions that third-party vendors are still reporting sales and the number will rise.Some longtime players say they made the decision that the cost is just not worth it. Christopher Farber, a
freelance photographer living on the Upper East Side, no longer splurges
on the season pass and has instead cut back his matches to about two a
month, opting for single-use permits instead. "I feel like $100 is a threshold," said Mr. Farber, who in the past
played about 50 times a year at the courts in Riverside Park with
partners he found through the website Craigslist. "I'm freelance and
kind of get by every month, but even at $100 I can see myself buying a
pass for the summer.'"

Interesting. Tennis courts are most emphatically NOT a public good. They are a club good, and can easily be provided as a club good (non-rival up to congestion point, but cheap to exclude). Should the government even be in this business? And if so, what is the "correct" price?

It's hard to know how to describe this story. There are just so many good parts. And, no, I'm not making this up.

The Icelandic Phallological Museum ....was moved several years ago to immortalize the victorious handball players in an unusually raunchy sculpture called The Icelandic National Handball Team.
The sculpture consists, basically, of a bunch of silver penises
pointing at the ceiling in a kind of wild-mushrooms-waving-in-a-field
effect.

1. Okay, so there's an Iceland Phallological Museum, to start with. It contains either actual penises, or representations of penises, of ALL the creatures found in Iceland. I did NOT know that. I did not WANT to know that. I expect to have nightmares about that. ("Ah! A butterfly penis! Enlarged 10,000 times!")

2. That statue is to honor the "handball" team. A double entendre, or did the artist really see those heroes as just a bunch of dicks?

3. And the artist, who is female, claims she didn't have any particular model for the highly idiosyncratic and anatomically correct peni. She just "made them from experience."

4. Finally, the artist made this sculpture to honor her father. What dad's heart doesn't glow at the thought of his daughter making a bunch of erect silver penises fashioned after an entire men's handball team?

With deep gratitude to reader M. Kaan, who knew that this link need to go to KPC, and NOT to BrendanNyhan.com .

I actually thought this was a spoof. No one could seriously mean this, as an invite to participate in a political science conference (the Westerns). To be clear: it's not a meeting of lefty nuts, it's a meeting of professional political scientologists.

Since the passage of the Taft Hartley Act in 1947, the US has seen
steady erosion in [protections for workers]. Workers in the US and Europe bear
a greater and greater burden for the social goods provided by their
society and receive fewer and fewer benefits while those who have benefitted
most from the triumph of capitalism have begun to knock down the reforms
achieved in the 20th Century. Hopes of spreading the improved human
condition to the global south have foundered on a reconstructed mercantilist
and neo-colonial international trade regime that has resulted in exploitation
of workers in lesser-developed nations and vast environmental degradation.Is democracy up to this challenge? Can the free-market global economy
again be brought into line with the goals of improving the conditions
of humanity? Are our institutions, nation-states, international compacts,
and ways of thinking up to this challenge, or will the latter part of
the 21st Century more closely resemble the late 19th than the late 20th?
While the WPSA welcomes proposals on all political and governmental
questions of interest to the discipline, in 2013, we would like to pay
particular attention to domestic and international inequality, its causes
and its consequences, and whether democratic institutions are up to
the task of addressing either.

Abstract:
Though religion has been shown to have generally positive effects on
normative ‘prosocial’ behavior, recent laboratory research suggests that
these effects may be driven primarily by supernatural punishment.
Supernatural benevolence, on the other hand, may actually be associated
with less prosocial behavior. Here, we investigate these effects at the
societal level, showing that the proportion of people who believe in
hell negatively predicts national crime rates whereas belief in heaven
predicts higher crime rates. These effects remain after accounting for a
host of covariates, and ultimately prove stronger predictors of
national crime rates than economic variables such as GDP and income
inequality. Expanding on laboratory research on religious prosociality,
this is the first study to tie religious beliefs to large-scale
cross-national trends in pro- and anti-social behavior.

Abstract:
Previous sociological studies have paid little attention to religion as a
central determinant of individual preferences for redistribution. In
this article we argue that religious individuals, living in increasingly
secular societies, differ in political preferences from their secular
counterparts. Based on the theory of religious cleavages, we expect that
religious individuals will oppose income redistribution by the state.
Furthermore, in contexts where the polarization between religious and
secular individuals is large, preferences for redistribution will be
lower. In the empirical analysis we test our predictions in a multilevel
framework, using data from the European Social Survey 2002–2006 for 16
Western European countries. After controlling for a wide range of
individual socio-economic factors and for welfare-state policies,
religion plays and important explanatory role. We find that both
Catholics and Protestants strongly oppose income redistribution by the
state. The cleavage between religious and secular individuals is far
more important than the difference between denominations. Using a
refined measure of religious polarization, we also find that in more
polarized context the overall level of support for redistribution is
lower.

Monday, August 06, 2012

But, this is not good. Garbage is falling off very fast, just like export orders. It could be that this means the recycle-topians are actually doing good work, but what it really means is that the economy is in the dump, because we are not buying stuff.

Drove at least half an hour looking for a coffee shop. Now, remember, this is Seattle. There are more than two coffee shops. Per block. But Raoul has standards. I have to admit the coffee was pretty fine. Notice that the word "Starbucks" is not coming up here, as an alternative.

Then to the brew pub, the Jolly Roger Taproom. Beers were very fine. Get the onion rings, called "Smokers." Top three onion rings all time, for me. Smashing.

Then to dinner. I was going to describe the place, The Walrus and Carpenter. But that wouldn't really capture the ambiance as well as this NYTimes review. On the other hand, the food was really, really great, not expensive, and the servers were so hip they almost weren't hip, just naturally cool. Since the restaurant is in Ballard, you have to be pretty hip just to get in. I would never have made it, but Raoul talked to the staff and they let it slide.

I had six really remarkable oysters, from the al la carte menu. It's printed daily, in case the oyster-nazi doesn't "like the look" of anything, and says, "You! Can't have these oysters!" Our visit, there were seven types of oysters, ranging from Samish Bay Sweets (mild) to Baywater Sweets (strong and briny, from Thorndyke Bay). The other five were sorted in order of less mild to more briny, in between. Except the oyster-nazi had apparently said, "No! No Baywater Sweets! I don't like the look of them!" The waitron actually told us this, then took a marker and marked through the Baywaters so that even idiots like us would understand that the oysters were not available. (I'm not making fun of the server, btw. Anyone who sees Raoul and me out on the town will NOT think, "There go some geniuses!")

The W&C is quite careful about its food, as the Times article notes. My favorite part was the notice on the menu (remember, this is an oyster and seafood restaurant) that "Oysters and other shellfish are prepared in our kitchen." Can't be too careful, I suppose.

Anyway, I had the Hammersleys, from nearby (!) Hammersley Inlet. Very nice. Extraordinary, in fact. Came with a very mild shaved fresh horseradish, and an acidy citrus topping, on the side. I used them. Yum.

We basically did the tapas thing, ordering bread and butter, toasted almonds (a huge, spicy portion, still warm), simple sliced tomatoes with salt and olive oil (tremendous). Excellent bread, as it should be, but it was.

Talked about our families. Many college faculty have "interesting" families, I think. Raoul and I are no exceptions.

A great night. Raoul took me to the airport, to get ready for my 11:50 pm redeye. Thanks, Seattle, that was great.